Page:How and Why Library 378.jpg

 {{c|

VI. JUST TO LIGHT A FIRE
}} When the Puritans came to America they had to bring everything you could think of with them—even pins and needles and—matches?

Oh, dear no! There were no wooden matches in those days, even in the old world. A tinder box was used to start new fires, and candles were lighted at the fireplace. It was a solemn thing to watch the father of the family start a fire. He took a little iron box down from the high mantel shelf. Inside it were a bar of steel, a flint stone, a bit of charred linen, or "tinder," and a bundle of wood splints tipped with sulphur. He struck the bar on the stone. A starry spark flew off on the tinder. Slowly a glow spread over the tinder. It did not burst into flames, but became hot enough to set fire to a sulphur-tipped splint. The splint was thrust into a handful of shavings and the blaze carefully fed into a fire with kindlings and pine knots. It was such a trouble to start a fire with a tinder box that coals were kept over night under ashes. If a fire went out a little boy was apt to be sent with an iron kettle, a mile away to borrow fire of a neighbor. Hunters learned to start camp fires as the Indians did, by rubbing two sticks together. Why, even Washington, who died nearly two hundred years after the Puritans came to America, never saw a match. And now we can buy a box of matches for a few cents.

It seems very odd, now, that matches weren't made long before they were, for people knew all about the two things necessary for making them. They knew that friction, or rubbing or striking things together, make them hot. And they knew that phosphorus and some other chemicals catch fire very easily. But it was only about a hundred years ago that phosphorus was melted with other things, and then hardened in little balls on the end of wood splints. And even then the matches would not burst into a blaze when struck on a rough surface. With the first boxes of matches came a little bottle of acid. The match was set on fire by touching it to the acid.